The twentieth century
marked a turning point for mankind, from the industrial
age to the space age. Some may argue that we are in the
information age and if so, it was brought about through
the knowledge and technology gained from our aviation,
rocket and space pioneers. The rapid transfer of
information today cannot and would not have occurred, for
example, without satellites and satellites could not have
occurred without aviation and rocket technology. And soon,
early in the 21st century, these two technologies will
converge to produce an aerospace plane that will make
travelling to space as commonplace as airline travel is
today. This is not a detailed history of all aviation or
rocketry but only those events that led mankind toward
spaceflight.

Aviation history began
on December 17, 1903 at 10:35 a.m. from Kill Devil hill
outside the village of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville
Wright took off, in the face of a 27 mile-per-hour wind,
and covered 120 feet in 12 seconds during the world's
first powered, sustained, and controlled flight. He had
"won" this place in history from his brother, Wilbur, by a
flip of a coin.

Modern rocketry was
started by three men, on parallel paths. These three
"fathers of modern rocketry" were Dr. Robert H. Goddard,
recognized as the most important figure in American rocket
history, Hermann Oberth, a Rumanian born Physicist working
in Germany, and Kanstantin Tsiolkovsky, an obscure Russian
school teacher and mathematician. Although Tsiolkovsky
never built any rockets, he did work out many of the
principles of astronautics, designed suitable rockets and
was know as the father of "Cosmonautics" in Russia. He
authored a series of remarkable technical essays on such
subjects as reaction propulsion with liquid-propellant
rockets, attainable velocities, fuel compositions, and
oxygen supply and air purification for space travellers.
He also wrote what apparently was the first technical
discussion of an artificial Earth satellite.

Robert Goddard's
interest in rocketry started in 1898 when, as a 16 year
old, he read "War of the Worlds" written by the English
science fiction writer and novelist, H.G. Wells. In an
autobiography written in 1927 (published in 1959) Goddard
acknowledged his debt to Wells and even wrote to him in
1932. Goddard began his experiments in rocketry while
studying for his doctorate at Clark University in
Worcester, Mass., and, on May 26, 1919, wrote a progress
report to the Smithsonian Institution entitled "A Method
of Reaching Extreme Altitudes." It was published by the
Smithsonian in January of 1920. In this paper, Goddard
first suggested that a liquid fuelled rocket could be sent
to the moon. Despite the scientific merit of his paper, he
was ridiculed by the public and the press for this one
"absurd" idea. Mainly because of this outcry, he would
never seek to publicize his work again.

From
his aunt Effie Goddard's farm in Auburn, Mass. and far
away from the public eye, Robert Goddard launched the
world's first liquid-powered rocket, on March 16, 1926.
Designed and built by Goddard, this rocket, fuelled by
liquid oxygen and gasoline climbed 41 feet, travelled 184
feet in 2.5 seconds and landed in a cabbage patch.
Although not much farther than Orville Wright's first
manned flight, it was, none the less, significant and
considered the "Kitty Hawk" of rocket history. Being
liquid fuelled was crucial. Up until then, all rockets
were based on a solid fuel, gunpowder, which dated back to
China in the late third century before Christ. Solid
fuelled rockets did not have adequate power to do the
things that Goddard wanted to do, like fly a rocket to the
moon.

Goddard's experiments
inspired another aviation pioneer, Charles Lindbergh, who,
on May 20-21, 1927, became the first person to ever cross
the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane. Lindbergh helped find
support for Goddard's experiments and corresponded with
him throughout the 1930's. Goddard went on to test rockets
pressurized by liquid nitrogen and on March 28, 1935
launched the first rocket with gyroscopic controls. It
flew to a height of 4,800 feet and 13,000 feet downrange
at a speed of 550 MPH.

Goddard was the first of
the early rocket pioneers to go beyond theory and design.
He entered the realm of "systems engineering" - the
complex business of making airframes, fuel pumps, valves,
and guidance devices compatible. Besides being the first
to launch a liquid-propellant rocket and adapt the
gyroscope to guide rockets, he was the first to install
movable deflector vanes in a rocket exhaust nozzle for
stability and steering, patented a design for a multistage
rocket, developed fuel pumps for liquid-rocket motors,
experimented with self-cooling and variable-thrust motors,
and he developed parachutes that automatically deployed
for recovering his instrumented rockets. Goddard put
rocket theory into practice and at the time of his death
in 1945, held 214 patents in rocketry. These patents still
produce royalties for his estate.

Meanwhile
back in post World War I Germany, Physicist Hermann Oberth
was receiving an enthusiastic response to his 1923 book on
the theories of space travel, "The Rocket into
Interplanetary Space." One of those inspired was a German
teenager, Wernher von Braun, who read Oberth's book in
1925 and a short five years later, would assist Oberth in
liquid-fuelled rocket experiments with about 15 pounds of
thrust. Von Braun always considered Oberth to be his
mentor and more like Tsiolkovsky (a theorist) than Goddard
(a practical builder).

Radio
commentator Paul Harvey tells a story of how young von
Braun's interest in rocketry almost got him labelled as a
juvenile delinquent. At the age of 13, von Braun exhibited
an interest in explosives and fireworks. One day the young
teenager obtained six skyrockets, strapped them to a toy
red wagon and set them off. Streaming flames and a long
trail of smoke, the wagon roared five blocks into the
centre of the von Braun family's home town, where they
finally exploded. As the smoke cleared, the toy wagon
emerged as a charred wreck. Young von Braun emerged in the
firm grasp of a policeman and despite being severely
reprimanded by his father, the youngster's interest would
not be denied. By the age of 22 he had earned his
doctorate in physics and two years later he was directing
Germany's military rocket development program.

By 1932, the German Army
was beginning to show an interest in the German Rocket
Society's efforts, of which von Braun was a part. On
October 1, 1932 he obtained a civilian position to work on
liquid propelled rockets in the Army rocket program. Most
of the German Rocket Society followed von Braun into
national service and the society disbanded.

Von Braun scored his
first success in December of 1934 with an A2 rocket
powered by ethanol and liquid oxygen. The rocket
researchers quickly outgrew their facilities in the
outskirts of Berlin and, in 1936, operations were
transferred to a remote island of Peenemuende on Germany's
Baltic coast. It was here that von Braun and his
colleagues designed the first successful ballistic rocket,
the A4 otherwise known as vengeance weapon number two or
the V-2 for short.

On October 3, 1942, the
space age began with the successful launch of the V-2 on
its third attempt and the world would never be the same.
Made as a weapon of war and not for science or adventure,
the 46 foot alcohol and liquid oxygen V-2 had a velocity
of 3500 mph and could carry a 1,650 pound warhead to a
range of 200 to 250 miles. It is the ancestor of
practically every rocket flown in the world today and, in
September of 1944, was launched against England toward
London but came too late to affect the outcome of the war.

In
January of 1945, von Braun knew the war was over and made
plans to move his team of about 125 rocket scientists and
engineers south to surrender to the Americans. Hitler had
ordered their execution to prevent their capture by the
Allies. On the same day that Berlin fell to the Soviet
Army, May 2, 1945, von Braun and his rocket team entered
the American lines to safety. "Project Paperclip" was
instituted to find as many German rockets, scientists and
engineers as possible and enough parts were found to build
100 V-2's.

By February of 1946 all
the German rocket scientist were moved to White Sands, New
Mexico and on April 16, 1945 the first of the captured
V-2's was launched in the United States. This signalled
the start of the U.S. space program or, at the very least,
the ballistic missile program. The most memorable
launching at White Sands, however, came on February 24,
1949, when a V-2 boosted a WAC Corporal rocket developed
by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 244 miles into space and
to a speed of 5,510 miles per hour, the greatest altitude
and velocity yet attained by a man-made object.

At the end of World War
II, Muroc (today known as Edwards Air Force Base) was the
place to be if you were a pilot. This was where the first
American jet airplanes were being tested. The U.S. had
amassed the largest fleet of military airplanes in the
world and with one test flight they would all become
obsolete. The Bell X-1, shaped like a 50 calibre bullet,
was the rocket plane designed to break the sound barrier.

During 20 previous
successful flights, the Bell X-1 had achieved mach 0.80
(80% of the speed of sound) but Bell test pilot, Chalmers
"Slick" Goodlin, wanted to renegotiate his contract to
over $150,000 before making an attempt at the sound
barrier. This brought the program to a halt. He knew the
risk involved. At the time, about 50% of the engineers
believed it couldn't be done.

This was when the U.S.
Air Force took over. For the normal pay of a few hundred
dollars a week, which included flight pay, an Air Force
pilot would make the attempt. The man chosen was World War
II ace Captain Chuck Yeager, one of the most junior pilots
but also the best. He believed and trusted his chief
engineer, Jack Ridley, that it could be done. During trial
flights there had been severe buffeting and loss of
elevator control at mach .94 but Ridley designed a moving
tail that fixed the problem.

On October 10, 1947,
Yeager again reached an indicated speed of mach 0.94.
However, frost formed on the inside of the canopy during
the glide earthwards despite Yeager's persistent effort to
scrape it off. Because of this, chase pilots had to talk
him down to a blind landing on the lakebed. Analysis later
that evening of the airplane's internal instrumentation
revealed that instead of mach 0.94, indications were that
the X-1 had actually reached mach 0.997 at 12,000 meters;
this worked out to approximately 1059 kilometres per hour,
infinitesimally close to the speed of sound.

All was ready for an
attempt at the sound barrier when, over the weekend,
Yeager broke two ribs while horseback riding. Not wanting
to be pulled from the flight, he stoically had the ribs
taped by a civilian doctor and didn't tell anyone except
Walt Williams, a NACA engineer, and Jack Ridley, his
flight engineer, who cut a broom handle to help Yeager
lock the X-1's door. At Yeager's suggestion, crew chief
Jack Russell rubbed the rocket plane's windshield with
Drene shampoo, an old fighter pilot's trick to prevent
frost from forming on the canopy at high altitude. So on
October 14, 1947, with two broken ribs, a broom handle and
shampoo on his windshield, Chuck Yeager became the first
person to break the sound barrier. Postflight data
analysis indicated the X-1 had reached mach 1.06 at
approximately 13,100 meters, an airspeed of 1125
kilometres per hour.

There was no public
adulation or ticker-tape parade for this great achievement
like there was for Charles Lindbergh when he first crossed
the Atlantic. What was once a public test was now shrouded
in cold war secrecy. The man with the "right stuff" would
have to wait for the public recognition he richly
deserved.

These became the golden
years at Muroc. Each test pilot trying to go higher,
faster or farther than the next, "pushing the envelope" of
each aircraft. Scott Crossfield was the next to achieve a
milestone. On November 20, 1953, he became the first to go
mach 2.01 in a Navy D-558-II only to lose the title of
"fastest man alive" 22 days later to Yeager when he went
to mach 2.5 in a Bell X-IA on December 12, 1953. Major
Arthur Murray later took the X-1A to a record altitude of
over 90,000 feet, the highest so far attained by man, on
June 4, 1954.

While the X-1 was the
first to break the sound barrier, the X-15 has the
distinction of being the most successful research airplane
ever flown. It made the first manned probes into the lower
edges of space and was designed for speeds of up to 4,000
mph and altitudes of 50 miles, but these goals were
exceeded on numerous occasions. Several X-15 pilots earned
an "astronaut" rating by attaining altitudes above 50
miles and the X-15 flight program contributed
significantly to the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects.

Scott Crossfield
participated in the first glided flight from 38,000 ft. on
June 8, 1959 and the first powered flight on September 17,
1959. Other significant milestones include mach 3.2 by
Joseph A. Walker on May 12, 1960 and the first man to take
the X-15 past mach 4, 5, and 6 was Major Robert M. White.
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was
also an X-15 test pilot. The final unofficial speed and
altitude records for the X-15 were 4,520 mph (mach 6.7)
and 354,200 feet (67.08 miles).

While the sound barrier
was being broken by aircraft, rocket research continued
and it soon became evident that more room was needed than
White Sands could provide. In 1949, the Joint Long Range
Proving Ground was established at Cape Canaveral. This
remote and deserted area on the east coast of Florida was
ideally suited for launches and on July 24, 1950, a
two-stage rocket call Bumper No. 8 became the first of
hundreds to be launched from "the Cape." It consisted of a
V-2 variant as the first stage which climbed 10 miles and
an Army WAC Corporal as the second stage which climbed an
additional 15 miles. On July 29, 1950 Bumper No. 7 was the
second missile launched from the Cape, reaching the
highest velocity (mach 9) attained by a man-made object to
date.

Coinciding with the
transfer of launch operations to the Cape, the Army's
missile program moved from White Sands to a post just
outside of Huntsville, a north Alabama cotton town. Von
Braun and his team arrived in April of 1950 and started
working on the next generation of the V-2, the Redstone.
This rocket, destined to launch America's first satellite,
Explorer I, and the first two U.S. manned suborbital
flights of Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, was first
launched from the Cape on August 20, 1953.

On October 4, 1957, the
USSR blindsided the United States in what has been called
a "technological Pearl Harbour" with the launch of Sputnik
I, the first man-made earth orbiting satellite. The
satellite was of little scientific value but was large
politically. Circling the earth roughly every 90 minutes,
its beeping radio signal shocked the U.S. and the world.
This was followed closely by Sputnik II on November 3,
1957, which carried a dog named Laika, the first live
organism launched into space. Although she died when her
oxygen ran out, the flight did bring back scientific data
on the effects of weightlessness and space travel on a
living animal.

Vostok rocket

It wasn't until January
31, 1958 that Explorer I, America's first satellite, was
launched on top of a version of the Redstone rocket, known
as the Jupiter C. On board was an important scientific
experiment of James A. Van Allen and it discovered the
radiation belts around the earth. These belts were later
named after him. The U.S. had finally entered the space
race but had a lot of catching up to do.

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